LEAD!

Well, first off, I have plenty of things that I will be posting about in the future, but I'm going to take my time with it. I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit down and post something.

As a mentioned in my last post, I was at the Franciscan University of Steubenville last week for LEAD and one of their annual youth conferences. It was truly an awesome week. I really learned a lot and made a lot of new friends, friends that I could call on when I am in need of any help.

As much as we learned about prayer and God, and the Church, the biggest thing I learned about was myself. See, we spent a lot of time in personal prayer with God, and we learned how to listen to Him. I realized that He knows me better than anyone else, and in that personal prayer time was when I learned all these things about me. God is like a loving parent in a lot of ways, one of those ways is that He likes to talk about us, His children, quite a bit.

I learned that silence isn't always awkward, but can be a blessing. I was able to see the identity that God had created me for, the person that He wants me to be.

I learned how to cast aside my old identity-the one built on sand-and embrace the new one-the one built on a rock-. I had been getting tired of the old identity. It was prideful, loud, and obnoxious. The new one is humble and reverent and very servant like. That is the man that God wants me to be, not the man that the world tells me that I need to be.

And my new family. Oh how I miss them! I'm referring to the other 40 people that I was there with, people whom I built relationships with that are closer and stronger than relationships I have with people Ive known all my life; even though we only knew each other for five days. This led to another realization of mine, that when a relationship is built on Christ, it grows stronger and stronger ten times faster than an average relationship. Look at it like this: when a house is built on rock, it is so sturdy that the construction time is cut in half. The builders don't have to worry about setbacks from an unstable foundation. One of my new brothers can attest to that, he builds houses for a living. He's really awesome. They all are really awesome.

As you can see, I like that whole built on rock/built on sand metaphor thing. It works!